


Valentine

by Kelinswriter



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Sanvers - Freeform, Sanvers Secret Valentine 2019, Sanvers Week, minor supercorp - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 06:12:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17782079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter
Summary: Maggie makes a vow. Then, life happens.For Izzi456 - I hope you have the Valentine's Day of your dreams!See notes for content warnings.Thanks, as always, toRoadiefor kicking my ass and convincing me to up the stakes.





	Valentine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Izzi456](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izzi456/gifts).



Their first Valentine’s Day had been an unmitigated disaster. 

Maggie put the blame for that squarely on her own shoulders. For years, snark and disdain had been her defense against the awful, wrenching hurt that resurfaced every February 14, and for the most part, her partners — even Emily — had gone along with it. She hadn’t been prepared for someone like Alex, who would look at her antipathy as a challenge to be overcome — not because Alex wanted to win, but because her first instinct was always to make things better. Alex liked to fix things, and when it came to this, Maggie was in no mood to be fixed. 

So things blew up, as things sometimes did, and Maggie would always regret it. She’d lost her temper, and that, more than anything else, made her take a fresh look at the way she’d been nursing her grudge against the holiday. In the end, she decided to play a little trick on herself: She’d remember the day her parents threw her out as February 13, not February 14. What did the number really matter, after all? In the end, the past was less important than the future that she might, if she was very lucky, be building with Alex.

(Plus, she’d gotten so pissed off that it hadn’t occurred to her until later that her beautiful, brave baby gay girlfriend had been planning to give her either a strip show or a lap dance — or possibly both. And there was no way she was going to fuck up and miss that again.)

Renting out a hotel ballroom and throwing Alex a belated Valentine’s Day dance was her way of making up for the lost opportunity. It was the best she could come up with on short notice; the owner owed Maggie a favor, and he’d been more than happy to pay it off by giving her the space at a discount for the night. Some balloons, a few treats from the local bakery, that gorgeous red dress, a suite with champagne on ice — it hadn’t taken more than a few hours of comp time and roughly half her tax refund to put it all together. As grand gestures went, it was pretty damn cheap.

In the future, Maggie vowed, she would do better. For as long as they were together, Alex would always have the Valentine’s Day of her dreams.

\---------

Their second Valentine’s Day was their first as a married couple. Between the wedding and the two weeks they spent on Mykonos and Santorini afterward, there was neither money nor vacation time left to do anything beyond going out for a nice dinner. Still, Maggie was determined to make it a night worth remembering. 

It started by making sure she was the one to both unlock and then relock the door to their apartment. As expected, Alex walked inside, draped her coat over the nearest barstool, and grasped at the breakfast bar, holding herself up with one hand while she kicked off her heels. 

“I know Kara swears by Il Palazzo, but this place could give it a run for its money. Don’t you —“ Alex broke off as Maggie slotted into place behind her. “Hey, Beautiful.”

“I have a surprise for you,” Maggie said, and drew the blindfold out of her pocket. 

Alex let out a little gasp when the black silk slipped over her eyes. She swallowed, and Maggie watched the muscles of her throat contract and release, her hands reaching back to find Maggie’s hips and pull her closer. “Maggie…”

“I know we shared that tiramisu for dessert, but it just wasn’t enough for me,” Maggie said, trailing her hands down the silky smooth material of Alex’s sleeveless dress. It was the color of merlot, and the contrast between the dark red material and Alex’s pale skin had been driving Maggie crazy all evening. She traced along Alex’s flanks, the shiver that move elicited making her own stomach clench, and then slid her hands beneath the skirt so she could graze her fingertips up the insides of Alex’s bare thighs. “I need more.”

“What did you have in mind?” Alex asked, and then made a high-pitched, incredibly sexy noise when Maggie’s lips caressed the back of her neck.

“Something sweet,” Maggie breathed into her skin. 

“You saying you have a sweet tooth for me?” Alex asked, her voice a low rasp, and then let out a laugh when Maggie bit her shoulder — not hard, but enough to leave a mark. 

“I’m saying that tonight, I want to take you anywhere you’ll let me,” Maggie whispered against the shell of Alex’s ear. 

Alex’s hips jerked in response, and Maggie held her steady until her feet were solidly beneath her once again. “Having some balance issues?”

“Just feeling a little weak in the knees.” Alex widened her stance, presumably to keep herself upright, though Maggie read it as an invitation to slide her hands over the lacy black panties that she knew Alex had worn just for her. “I’d like that, by the way. To go wherever you want to go.”

“You’re sure?” Maggie asked, pressing down with one strategically placed fingertip. It brought forth another of those high-pitched noises that Maggie so loved, and she smiled against Alex’s shoulder. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“That’s a yes, Mrs. Danvers,” Alex said, and turned her head until she could press a kiss to that very sensitive spot where Maggie’s neck and jaw met her ear. Maggie felt it roll through her like an electric current, and her fingers, of their own volition, tightened their grip. 

“Maggie.” Alex’s voice was raw and ragged, and Maggie felt pleasure surge at the thought that her words, her touches, could fill Alex with such desperate, aching need. “Maggie, please. Please take me to bed.”

And so Maggie did. She guiding Alex across the living room, undressed her slowly, eased her back onto the bed, whispering to her all the while about how beautiful she was, about how much she was loved, about the heights to which she was about to be taken. Maggie bound Alex to the bedframe, both hands and feet lovingly wrapped in silken ties, and then kissed every inch of skin she could reach until Alex was writhing against the sheets. 

“Maggie,” Alex whimpered, and Maggie pressed a hand to her diaphragm, the gesture intended to both calm and enflame. “You’re killing me, you know that, right?”

“Just enjoy the ride,” Maggie said, and felt Alex’s muscles jump beneath her touch. She bit back a laugh and pressed a kiss to Alex’s breast, her throat, her mouth. “If you need to we can stop, Babe,” she murmured, and reached up to clasp Alex’s hand, their fingers intertwining. “But I still haven’t gotten my fill.” 

“No, keep going.” Alex canted her hips upward, her limbs straining against the bindings, and then turned her head from side to side, as if seeking some respite from the blindfold. “But first, kiss me again?” she asked, something plaintive in her voice.

“Oh, Sweetheart,” Maggie replied, and guided Alex’s mouth to hers, kissing her with all the love, the heat, the passion that she could muster. It wasn’t enough; it would never be enough, and so she smoothed a hand down Alex’s stomach, kissing her once more just because she could. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered, and Alex made a soft noise of complaint. 

Maggie left then, just for a moment, to retrieve the second half of their dessert. She’d made the homemade whipped cream that morning while Alex was in the shower, and the strawberries had been purchased during their run to the farmer’s market on Sunday. Alex had somehow not noticed — or at least pretended not to notice — that Maggie had hidden them behind a carton of leftover Chinese in hopes they’d be forgotten until tonight. 

She sidestepped first Alex’s dress, then her own, as she padded across the living room and back to Alex’s side. The mattress dipped as she sat down, her bare hip brushing against Alex’s thigh, and Alex drew in a strangled breath. Her hands clenched, and she released them slowly, her body arching upward against the fingers that Maggie trailed down her abs. 

“This is going to be fun,” Maggie said, pressing a kiss to Alex’s solar plexus. Then she lifted the spoon and drew a ragged white line from Alex’s breast to her hip. 

It was the contrast, Alex would say later: The chill of the whipped cream, the warm heat of Maggie’s tongue. Like stepping into a hot shower after hours in freezing temperatures.

(Alex didn’t have to say that it reminded her of that first hot shower after hours in that frigid, watery tank. Maggie understood, because she’d been there through that first, delirious burst of relief, and through the tears that followed when Alex finally eased down enough to let herself cry. And Maggie had known, too, that she needed to help reclaim this sensation for Alex, much in the same way that Alex had helped reclaim Valentine’s Day for her.)

And the strawberries? Well, they both agreed that they were delicious — but not as delicious as what came after, when there was nothing but Maggie’s hands and fingers against Alex’s skin.

Two weeks later, when Maggie ordered French toast with strawberries and whipped cream for brunch, Kara made some offhand comment about Maggie having a sweet tooth.

Lena caught the look on Maggie’s face and snorted. Alex fell off her chair.

Maggie never lost her sweet tooth.

 

\------------

 

It was their third Valentine’s Day together and, as usual, the world was coming apart.

“There’s no other way,” Alex insisted. “I have to do this.”

She was talking about making herself a martyr. That was what Alex did, after all: Subvert her own needs, made herself less than, sacrifice herself to whatever those around her — her sister, her parents, the DEO, even J’onn — demanded. 

But not this time. Not if Maggie had anything to say about it.

“No, Alex.” Maggie sat down across from Alex — more like fell down, really, because her knees gave way in those last few inches — and reached for Alex’s hand. “I won’t let you do this.”

“What other options do we have?” Alex’s hands trembled, and Maggie clutched at them, hoping that somehow, in the midst of this madness, that grip would help her see reason. “If I don’t let J’onn mind wipe me, Haley will find out that Kara is Supergirl and our lives will effectively be over. They’ll send me to someplace that makes Cadmus look like a day spa and you…” Alex took a panicked breath, her eyes wide and dark and desperate. “They’ll come after you next, and I can’t let them do that. I won’t let them destroy you.”

“But you’ll destroy yourself instead?” Maggie watched Alex’s eyes well up with tears, not just from fear, but from the frustration that came from being caught in a trap. But Maggie couldn’t let herself get tangled in Alex’s emotions; not now, when she needed to think clearly for both of their sakes. So she concentrated on the raw anger bubbling up in her stomach, stoking it to a fine point until its sharpness pushed her past her despair. 

“I know that you would do anything for Kara, including step in front a bullet,” Maggie said, and then added as a deliberate provocation, “because you tend to forget that she’s bulletproof and you’re not.”

Alex blinked at that, her jaw hardening in a way that would be barely perceptible to most people. To Maggie, it signaled a fight on the horizon. “Yaou’re saying that I should just hang my own sister out to dry?”

“No,” Maggie said. “I’m saying that you need to stop and think about what making this sacrifice would do, not just to you, but to us.” 

“We’d just go on, with me not knowing that Kara is Supergirl. How would that affect us?” Alex pulled her hands out of Maggie’s grasp and sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked proud and angry and so, so afraid, and also hotter than any woman had a right to in her torn jeans and that black leather jacket that had mysteriously migrated from Maggie’s side of the closet to her own. The thought of losing that — of losing everything that made Alex _Alex_ — filled Maggie with an unreasoning panic. 

And it really pissed her off.

“Oh, gee, I don’t know, just in every way possible?” Maggie said, irritation giving her voice a sharp edge. “Alex, think about how much of our life together is built on me knowing that Kara is Supergirl. I mean, she was with you the first time we met, and when you came after me when I was tied up in that warehouse. After I got shot, she’s the one who flew me back to the DEO so you could patch me up. And then, after we started dating, when you had that panic attack after our first night together…”

“That was not a panic attack,” Alex huffed out the familiar rebuttal. “I was worried about Kara and I just didn’t handle it well!”

Maggie just looked at Alex, not saying anything, and waited for Alex to realize that she’d just made Maggie’s point for her. It took her a minute, but when she did, her arms came down, her shoulders slumping forward while her hands, tangled together, came to rest in her lap. 

“Okay, so, all of that history would be gone. I wouldn’t remember all those times the three of us worked cases together, or how we’d kick each other under the table on game night when Kara used to hide who she was from Lena, or the way that…” Alex’s breath hitched, and Maggie sensed that the true enormity of what she’d be losing was finally dawning on her. “The way that the two of you held me when you rescued me from that tank. The way it felt to know that neither of you had given up.” 

“Yeah, Babe.” Maggie took Alex’s hands between her own, their fingers settling into a wild, knotted tangle. “That’s what you’d be sacrificing.” 

“But you’d still love me, right?” Alex asked, the desperation in her voice cutting Maggie to the quick. “Even without all of that, if I lost that piece of who I was, I know you’d still love me.”

“Of course I would,” Maggie said, and then waited a beat so that what came next would have the necessary impact. “But I’m not sure that you would love me.”

Alex jerked away from her at that, and Maggie could see that what she’d said had landed like a sucker punch. “How could you…” Alex’s eyes dropped, and Maggie saw tears forming at the lashes. “Mags, how could you ever think that I wouldn’t love you?”

“You would at first,” Maggie said, and then took a moment, choosing her words with as much care as if their entire lives depended on them. Which, she was fairly sure, they actually did. “But Sweetheart, you wouldn’t be you. And a life in which I know your sister’s secret and you don’t is going to come apart at the seams as quickly as it would have if I hadn’t figured out who she was early on.”

“I know it’ll be hard,” Alex said, the way she bit her lip telling Maggie that a tiny bit of uncertainty was starting to worm its way through her stubborn defenses. “Maybe even harder than it is for me and Kara.”

“It’ll be a disaster,” Maggie said, leaning in to that doubt, because at this point, pushing into it like it was a sore tooth in need of tending was all she had left. “Babe, don’t you see? I’ll be lying to you constantly, and you’ll sense it. You’ll know that I’m not being truthful. And that will eat at us, in little ways at first, and then in bigger ones, not just because I remember our relationship differently than you do, but because once Haley discovers no one at the DEO knows who Supergirl is she’s going to widen her net. She’ll come after anyone in National City who has a known relationship with Supergirl, and that puts a target on my back. Sooner or later, I’ll be the subject of a witch hunt that you’re running.”

“It won’t come to that,” Alex insisted. “But even if it does, I’ll protect you.”

“Protect me with what?” Maggie asked, and then drove her point home as hard as she could, even if she hated herself a little for it. “With something you can’t even remember?”

“Then you…” Alex’s face tensed, that big, beautiful brain tracking through all the implications until she arrived at the same conclusion that Maggie had reached intuitively the moment Alex first explained her radical plan. “The only way for this to work is for you to be mind-wiped too.”

“And then what are we?” Maggie asked. “Two people whose relationship has been so fundamentally altered that it’s like we’re starting from scratch?” She watched Alex flinch at that, her hands grasping at her thighs, and put a hand on Alex’s knee to steady her. “We’d be strangers to each other, Babe. No matter how good J’onn is at this, the foundation of who we are would be gone. I don’t think we could survive that. I don’t think any couple could.”

“I hate this,” Alex whispered, and Maggie wrapped her arms around Alex’s shoulders, drawing her in until Alex’s head was tucked into her neck. Alex’s hands grasped at Maggie’s waist, her fingers fisting so hard into Maggie’s blue button down that they dragged the material free of her jeans. “We shouldn’t have to live in a world where this is how we spend our Valentine’s Day.”

“I know. But we do.” Maggie cradled Alex’s head in her hands, scratching her fingernails through the fine, close-cropped hair above Alex’s ears. “I love you, my beautiful, sexy, incredibly smart, stupid brave wife. And I’m not giving up who you are, or who you are to me, because a bunch of fascists have gotten a little bit of power and are eager for more.” She kissed Alex’s temple, her hand rubbing up and down Alex’s back, and, on impish impulse, added, “Plus, the glasses.”

Alex laughed at that, and that sudden rush of emotion must have opened a floodgate because, an instant later, Alex was coming apart in Maggie’s arms. She closed her eyes and rocked Alex gently, whispering soft words into her neck and hair. Even in the midst of this madness, it felt so safe and right to hold Alex like this; to be the strength and solace she needed, the warmth she clung to in the midst of the storm. 

“You’re right,” Alex said, her words muffled by Maggie’s shoulder. “It would never work. You’d see right through it.”

“And so would you.” Maggie drew back enough to look at Alex, framing her wife’s face in her hands. She brushed Alex’s tears away with her thumbs and saw a flicker of that smile that she loved so well; a smile that could light up the entire world.

“Now come on, Danvers, think,” Maggie said. “How the hell are we going to get out of this mess?”

“Together,” Alex said, a gleam of determination in those big brown eyes.

In the end, that was exactly how they got out of it.

Together.

\---------------

Their fourth Valentine’s Day, Alex was eight months pregnant with Hannah.

Their fifth, Hannah was teething. 

Their sixth, they spent a week traipsing around New Zealand while Hannah stayed with her Aunties Kara and Lena. 

Their seventh was two days after Maggie gave birth to Jamie.

Their eighth: More teething, this time while coping with a ticked off toddler.

Their ninth, and they were fighting for their lives in a centuries-old alien war that had spread to Earth. The world seemed dark, and it looked like it wasn’t going to get lighter anytime soon.

Yet they always took the time to exorcise the ghosts of loneliness and abandonment that still haunted the day. To defy them anew, simply by being in love.

And the years kept rolling by.

\-----------

 

Their twenty-eighth Valentine’s Day, and Maggie feared it might be their last.

She’d awakened that morning to Alex already off to the lab. She was head of the Bioengineering Department at L-Corp now, having taken both the job and the enormous salary that went with it when she’d been forced out of the DEO in disgrace. An op gone wrong had resulted in multiple fatalities and exposed the agency, and though the botched mission hadn’t been Alex’s fault, someone had to take the blame. 

Congress, of course, decided that someone was Alex. 

Maggie had done what she could to focus attention where it belonged: On an overeager U.S. military that had been trying for years to wrest the agency’s control out of civilian hands. But the National City Police Commissioner’s voice didn’t count for much when both senators and presidential candidates were using phrases like “housecleaning” and “fresh ideas,” and Alex had been forced to resign. Once she did, some spark of hope in her — some purpose — simply died. It was like a wall had come down, and everyone was on the opposite side of it. 

Even Maggie.

They’d gone through bad patches before: a week here, a month there. There’d been that awful period three years back after they lost Eliza to a sudden stroke, but their shared grief had eventually brought them closer together. But now, when Maggie reached out her hand, Alex turned away. And Maggie no longer had the energy to bridge that gap.

Hannah thought they were being idiots, and told Maggie so often when she checked in from South America, where she was doing doctoral research in what was left of the Brazilian rain forest. Jamie thought they _were_ idiots, but she still showed up at their doorstep on every school break, trying to cajole them into getting through a meal without sniping at each other. But no amount of tag-team blackmail from their girls could close the distance that had formed — a distance so profound that now, they spent their nights clinging to a few inches at the opposite ends of their mattress. 

It had been like this for a year. And the one thing Maggie was sure of was that she couldn’t do it for two.

She heard a sound from the other side of the bed; a sigh, perhaps, or maybe just a half-formed word spoken in Alex’s sleep. But Alex was too still, too rigid, to actually be unconscious. And then the sigh came again, louder and faster, and Maggie realized that Alex was trying to hold back a sob.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, not turning, even though every instinct in her body told her she should. She was too sure that if she did, Alex would just huddle in further on herself, her hunched shoulders flashing a warning as brilliant as any neon sign: Stay away.

“Nothing.” Alex sounded so tired — so _lost_ — and all Maggie wanted to do was hold her, if only Alex would let her. “It’s nothing, Maggie. Just go to sleep.”

And those words, that variation on a theme that had been Alex’s stock answer for the better part of a year, cracked the façade of indifference that Maggie had been wearing since sometime around Halloween. 

It didn’t just crack it, in fact.

It shattered it completely.

“I’m tired of this,” she said, rolling onto her back. She looked over at Alex, lying there in the same plain white t-shirt she’d been sleeping in for more than a decade, and slapped the mattress alongside her hip. “Aren’t you tired of this?”

Maggie heard Alex draw in a breath and felt her shift her legs against the mattress before settling back into that tense, coiled stillness. “Maggie, please just go to sleep. Or if I’m bothering you, I can go sleep on the couch.”

“No,” Maggie said, and turned just in time to see Alex flinch. “Oh, that gets a reaction, does it? You offer to sleep on the couch and I say ‘no’ and that gets through to you? When me begging you over and over to talk to me doesn’t?”

“What is it you want me to say?” Alex asked. “I fucked up, people died, the end.”

“You didn’t fuck up,” Maggie said, the words coming out harsh — too harsh, because this time she was sure that Alex was choking back a sob. She closed her eyes and swallowed down her anger, gentling her voice by sheer force of will. “You didn’t fuck up, Alex. I saw the reports, I walked the scene, and I know exactly how it went down. But yes, people died. Because sometimes, no matter what we do, people die.”

“And I have to own that,” Alex said. Her voice had changed over the years, taking on more of a whiskey-soaked rasp as time went on, but Maggie still heard the kind, winsome tones of the young woman she’d been when they first met so many years ago. “People died on my watch, Maggie. A lot of good people are gone because when the moment came, I didn’t make the right decision.”

“Because you were set up, Babe,” Maggie replied, her mind once again replaying the images of that awful day. “You didn’t have proper air support and you weren’t fully briefed. They sent you out there with half the information you needed and popped popcorn while you made the best of a situation that was fucked from the get-go.” 

Alex huffed out a breath. “I don’t know why we’re even bothering to have this conversation. It’s not like you’re going to change my mind.”

“And you’re not going to change mine.” Maggie let that sit for a long moment. “Maybe that’s why we’re having it.”

Maggie saw Alex turn her head; not much, but enough that she could look up at the ceiling. Her hair glinted in the half-light coming through the window: still auburn, mostly, though it was now shot through with strands of gray at her temples and hairline. She used to get it colored every six weeks like clockwork, but lately, she’d been letting it go. Jamie had teased her the other day about how both her parents were finally going gray, but Alex had just given her a wan smile, not even tweaking their girl’s dimple like she used to before she retreated into her study.

“Why does us rehashing the same conversation we’ve had a thousand times since that night help anything?” Alex tugged at the blankets, pulling them tighter around her shoulders. “I can’t change what happened, Maggie. I even emailed Sara asking her if there was a way.”

“What did she say?” Maggie asked, though she could imagine the salty response.

“She told me to leave time travel to the professionals.” Alex rolled a bit further onto her back — not quite all the way, but enough that Maggie could discern her profile in the shadowy darkness. “And then I asked Barry about it, and he told me to talk to Sara.”

“So the time travelers in our fucked up, collapsed mess of a universe said to leave it alone.” Maggie grasped at the sheets, the instinct to reach across the bed, to offer her hand just one more time, growing more insistent. She swallowed hard against the pain of it, at this sense that they were teetering on the very brink, and said, “Alex, we’ve been through so many losses. So much pain. Through…”

She didn’t say it; didn’t want to bring up that dark day, ten years ago, when Kara had said, “I can’t be Kara Danvers anymore,” not because she didn’t want to, but because there wasn’t enough makeup in the world to disguise that she wasn’t aging normally. She’d spent two years taking Lena and their girls to all the worlds she’d visited as a child, and then settled quietly under a new identity somewhere in the highlands of Scotland. She still popped up as Supergirl whenever the need arose, of course, and Alex and Maggie visited Scotland whenever they could, but a distance had, of necessity, formed now that they were no longer in each other’s daily lives. 

“You’ve lost so much,” Maggie said quietly. “But you don’t have to lose me.”

Alex didn’t react to that, other than to blink once. There were fine lines around those beautiful eyes now, and on her neck and hands and arms too. Her right shoulder gave her trouble, and so did her left knee, and her fingers were slow and stiff in the mornings or when it was cold. Age was finding her; finding them both, as Maggie’s right hip reminded her when she rolled onto her side. She bit back a grunt and adjusted her pillow, daring to inch a bit closer to the middle of the bed.

“I got a job offer,” Maggie said, dropping the bombshell she’d been saving for a right time that she simply didn’t think would ever come, and saw Alex go rigid at the words. “Metropolis Police Commissioner. It’d be a chance to do there what I did here, only on a much bigger scale.” She waited for a response, counting out one breath, two; three, five, ten. “Tell me not to take it.” 

“It’s a huge…” Alex trailed off, sucking in a breath, and Maggie had no doubt that she was crying now, no matter how much she tried to hide it. “You can’t turn it down, Maggie. You shouldn’t.”

“That’s not an answer.” Maggie let the silence settle around them, thinking back on that first electric encounter at the airport; how it had set her nerves jangling, as if her body had known what she’d found, even when her mind was still trying to process it. That strange stretch of time when Maggie had been forced to be patient, maybe more patient than she had ever been, while Alex groped her way toward her long-delayed epiphany. Their sweet, tender courtship, that hasty proposal, and everything since: the fighting, the fucking. Having each other’s backs, and loving each other with everything they had. Their babies, and all the richness that had brought into their lives.

Them. This strange, beautiful, complicated thing that was _them_.

Maggie couldn’t give it up; no matter what happened, no matter how hard things got. They’d said _forever_ too many times to make that word a lie now.

“Alex, look at me.” She waited a beat and softly said, “My love, please look at me.”

Alex turned her head, but slowly; so slowly that Maggie was reminded of the Tin Man overdue for some oil. Her eyes found Maggie’s in the dim light, and for the first time in a longer than Maggie could remember, she didn’t look away.

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” Alex said, and for an instant Maggie’s heart froze, because maybe this was it; maybe Alex was finally going to tell her what she was thinking. And as much as Maggie had been longing for that, it filled her with terror.

Because what if Alex was thinking that she needed to be free?

But Alex simply said, “I love you, Maggie Sawyer. I will never not love you. But I don’t know who I am anymore, and you shouldn’t have to pay the price for that.”

And Maggie saw it then; what had been standing between them all this time. Not Alex’s pride, but Alex’s inability to see herself as anything but secondary to those around her. That goddamn martyr complex, rearing its ugly head once again.

“You’re my wife,” Maggie said, as if that solved everything. It didn’t, of course, and she knew that it didn’t, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Alex that. Instead she slid across the bed, moving fast before she lost her nerve, and tugged Alex into her arms, spooning her like she had when they were young and it felt like they had all the time in the world. “My wife, and Hannah and Jamie’s mother and Kara’s sister and Eliza and Alura’s aunt. You’re Winn and Lena and J’onn and Nia’s friend, and you’re the head of the Bioengineering division at L-Corp, and you’re the sexiest, most beautiful badass I’ve ever known.”

“I feel like I failed you,” Alex said, drawing in a tearful breath. She pressed her hand atop the one Maggie had tucked against her stomach and threaded their fingers together, her grip tight to the point of desperate. “I feel like I’ve failed everyone, but you most of all.”

“Never,” Maggie said, and pressed her face into Alex’s neck. “Never,” she repeated, breathing in Alex’s scent, that intangible mix of lavender soap and green tea shampoo and clean, healthy sweat and warm, sweet skin. These things that smelled like Alex; that smelled like love.

Three decades, and Maggie still couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten so lucky. 

She gave Alex time; let her settle into her touch, into the warmth of them holding each other. Gave her time to process, because while Alex’s brain was lightning-quick, her emotions tended to move at a far more glacial pace. Maggie didn’t mind; she’d been starved of Alex’s touch for so long that even their fully-clothed bodies pressed back to front was enough to fill her heart to bursting. 

“So you still think I’m a badass, huh?” Alex said at last, a hint of her old humor in her tone. Her thumb caressed Maggie’s, and with that small gesture, Maggie felt the coiled tension that had been knotted inside her for longer than she could remember finally start to ease.

“Always.” Maggie pressed a kiss to Alex’s cheek, her voice dropping into that low register that was for Alex alone. “And you’re still the only woman who could ever make me like Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, dammit,” Alex groaned. There was a sudden flutter of movement, and the next thing Maggie knew, Alex had turned on her other side, her arms wrapping around Maggie’s shoulders. She pressed their foreheads together, murmuring, “I’m sorry, Babe. I forgot.” 

“It’s all right,” Maggie soothed, and lifted one hand to caress Alex’s cheek. “We’ll make up for it later, just like the first time around.”

“I still can’t believe you threw a Valentine’s Day dance just for me.” Alex’s warm breath whispered across Maggie’s cheek. “That’s when I knew I loved you.”

“It took me a little longer,” Maggie said, and kissed the curve of Alex’s jaw when she made a noise of disapproval. “But once I did, I knew I was in love for life.”

“Whipped,” Alex said, and laughed when Maggie nudged her in the ribs. “Whipped forever.”

“Yeah, Babe,” Maggie said, and felt that mix of indefinable joy and indelible sureness that was Alex Danvers in her arms. “Ride or die.”

They both called in sick the next day, each having each been struck with a separate, very sudden onset of what Alex still, to this day, jokingly referred to as the Black Lung. They spent the morning in bed relearning each other’s bodies, and the afternoon setting up the first of what would be many appointments with a marriage therapist. 

Their problems didn’t go away overnight, but they dealt with them like they dealt with everything: together. 

They never looked back.

_____ 

On their fiftieth Valentine’s Day, Maggie was in the hospital, and it didn’t look like they would get to have their fifty-first.

But they did.

**Author's Note:**

> Light bondage. Somehow, I don't think any of you will complain.


End file.
